John Hart - The Last Child

They were halfway across when metal hit metal. Johnny saw a shower of sparks, the top of a car, and a motorcycle that cartwheeled once before the body came over the rail. One of the legs bent impossibly, the arms churned, and Johnny knew that it was a mistake, a pinwheel that screamed with a man’s voice.

It landed at Johnny’s feet with a wet thump and the double snap of breaking bones. It was a man in a muddy shirt and brown pants. One arm twisted under his back, angle all wrong, and his chest looked caved in. His eyes were open, and they were the most amazing blue.

Brakes squealed on the road. Johnny stepped closer to the injured man, saw skin torn from one side of his face, right eye starting to go bloody. His good eye locked on Johnny as if the boy could save him.

Up on the road, the big engine gunned. Tires barked in reverse. Johnny felt the vibration when the car rolled back onto the bridge.

The injured man’s jaw worked. “He’s coming back.”

“It’s okay,” Johnny said. “We’ll help you.” He knelt in the dirt. The man held out his hand and Johnny took it. “It’s going to be okay.”

But the man ignored Johnny’s words. With a surprising strength, he pulled the boy closer. “I found her.”

Johnny focused on the man’s lips. “You found who?”

“The girl that was taken.”

Johnny felt cold shock. The man’s body seized, and blood shot from his mouth onto Johnny’s shirt. Johnny barely noticed. “Who?” he said again, then louder. “Who?”

“I found her…”

Above them, the big engine idled. The injured man rolled his eyes up, his fear obvious. He pulled Johnny so close that he smelled blood and crushed organs. The man’s eyes crinkled at the edges, and Johnny heard a single word. A whisper.

“Run…”

“What?”

The man’s grip tightened. Johnny heard how the big engine rumbled and spat, then something like steel on concrete. The man’s hand clenched so hard that nails cut Johnny’s skin.

“For God’s sake-”

The body seized again, spine locked tight, broken arm twisting.

“Run…”

Johnny looked down, saw a boot heel push dirt, and something clicked in his mind.

This was not an accident.

Johnny looked at the bridge and saw a hump of movement: a head and a shoulder, a man moving around the front of the car. It was a shadow man, a cutout. Johnny felt the blood on his hands, sticky wet and going cold.

Not an accident.

The man’s body seized, head slamming dirt, boot heel drumming. Johnny tried to pull his hand free, had to jerk with all he had. Noise on the bridge. Movement. Fear was a knife that went in low and touched some deep place in him. Johnny had never been so scared in all of his life, not the day he woke up to find his father gone, not the times his mom winked out and Ken got that gleam in his eye.

Johnny was terrified.

Frozen.

Then he turned and ran, along the river, down the trail. He ran until his throat closed, until his heart tried to claw free from his chest. He ran fast and he ran afraid. He ran until the giant black monster stepped from the shadows and grabbed him up.

Then Johnny screamed.

Levi Freemantle carried a precious thing on his shoulder. It was a heavy box, wrapped twice in black plastic and closed up with silver tape. Few men could carry it as far as Levi had, but Levi was not like other men. He ignored the hurt of it, the sense of it. He kept his feet on the path and moved his lips when words rose up in his mind. He listened to God’s voice in his head and followed the river like his momma taught him when he was a boy. The river was the river, never-changing, and Levi had walked the river trail a hundred times, maybe. Not that he counted that good.

But a hundred was a lot.

He’d walked it a lot.

Levi saw the white boy before he heard him. He was coming straight at him, tearing down the trail like the devil was at his heels and hungry for white boys. His head rode low on skinny shoulders, face gone purple red, feet skipping over rocks and holes as branches snapped at his face and missed. The boy never looked back, not once, and it was like watching a hunted animal run.

Levi wanted to let the boy pass, but there was no way to hide. There was river and there was trees, but Levi stood six foot five and weighed three hundred pounds. People with guns were looking for him. Cops with bright metal on their belts, guards with clubs and nasty smiles. So Levi asked God what to do, and God told him to grab the boy up. Don’t hurt him, God said. Just pick him up.

“Truly?” Levi whispered, but God did not answer; so Levi shrugged, then stepped from behind the tree and grabbed the boy up with one thick arm. The boy screamed, but Levi held him, gentle as he could. He was surprised, when God told him what to tell the boy.

“God says-,” he began.

But Levi did not speak fast enough. The boy got one of Levi’s fingers in his mouth and clamped down until the skin popped like a grape. His teeth went all the way to the bone, and blood pumped hard. It hurt, really hurt, and Levi flung the boy down into the dirt. He felt bad when he did it, like maybe he’d let God down.

But it hurt.

The boy rolled to his feet and took off like a rabbit, but Levi didn’t think once about chasing him. He couldn’t run with the heavy box on his shoulder, and he couldn’t leave the box, not even for a minute. So he held his bloody finger and wished it would stop hurting like it did. The pain made him think of his wife, and that was a worse kind of hurt, so he kept one hand around the bloody finger and listened for the voice of God. When he finally spoke to Levi, he said it might be nice to know what the boy was running from.

Levi shrugged his giant shoulders.

“God talks and Levi walks.”

That was a funny.

It took twenty minutes to get to the bridge. The blood on the rocks looked black and wrong, and Levi listened hard before laying his package on the ground and stepping out from under the willow tree. He wanted somebody to tell him what to do, but God had gone still. A finger of hot wind laid itself across his cheek and lightning flashed off in the west. The air was heavy with a dry, powdery smell that rose from the dust under the bridge and felt charged with static.

Levi thought he heard a voice in the river. He tilted his head, and listened for a full minute before deciding it was only water moving. Or a snake in the grass. Or a carp in the reeds at the river’s edge.

But not God.

When God spoke, Levi felt cool air pile up above him; he felt peaceful, even when he remembered the bad he’d done.

So this wasn’t God.

He stood over the body and his head wasn’t working right. It wasn’t that he was scared-although he did feel small, sharp nails on the back of his neck-Levi felt sad for the crooked man. Busted up and leaking red was wrong. So was the stillness, the open, flat-looking eyes.

Levi rocked from one foot to the other. He rubbed at the scars on his face, the right side where the skin looked melted. He didn’t know what to do, so he sat down to wait for God to tell him.

God would know.

God was good like that.

Johnny came onto his own street just as the sun set and the light faded to purple. Night sounds rose in the woods. He limped, in pain, but his mind was flush with hope. It burned with it.

I found her.

You found who?

The girl that was taken.

Johnny replayed the words over and over, looking for some reason to doubt the emotion that pushed him through the pain that radiated up from his feet. Eight miles, most of it running, all of it without shoes. His feet were torn and cut, but his right foot was the worst, gashed by a broken bottle two miles after the hobgoblin with the black box grabbed him. Johnny could still taste the man’s blood, the dirt on his skin. He tried not to think about it too much. Instead, he thought about his sister, his mother.